Page:The Poetry of Dante Rossetti by Hall Caine.pdf/13

 for doing his work supremely well. Every thought in "Dante Verona " and "The Last Confession" is mixed with and coloured by a personal moral instinct that is safe and right. And now, looking at the relation of art and morality as seen in the light of Mr. Rossetti's poetry, there will be no need for "the poor fine arts to take themselves away" from before the face of aggressive puritanism, if artists will look closely to it that the personal nature which, without purpose of their own, permeates their work is such as will bear fruits of good meaning. After that, art for art, by all means, both first and last, and art will assuredly be good on other grounds as well as good on her own.

We cannot easily bring ourselves to believe that either moral or artistic self-consciousness can inspire true art-work, or even so much as nestle at the root of it. We know that men have consciously wrought great work for the praise and achievement, and for the expression of religious feeling; but we cling to the belief that the noblest and best has been done when the artist has forgotten his purpose and yielded himself up with abandon to his mood. The sonnets of Mr. Rossetti's "House of Life" seem to our enchanted sense to have grown up out of sheer joy of their own loveliness. Nevertheless, all art is essentially self-conscious, and between two such opposite aims and forces as operate in the art of Cowper, and in the art of Rossetti we see only certain differences of kind and measure of self-consciousness. The inspiration is dead when the picture is painted and the poem written. It is the key of poet's art to prolong the inspiration or reproduce it by memory. The "mute inglorious Milton," and the Milton of imperishable speech differ only in this: To the one the angel, whose visitations both enjoy, comes like soft music heard in sleep and leaves after it an unsatisfied yearning and sweet sadness; to the other it is an angel to be wrestled with the whole night long, if perchance with the dawn it leave its name and blessing behind it. And the most peerless thing of beauty in Mr. Rossetti's volume is to the inspiration which induced it like his "Portrait" to the lady it represented— "Less than her shadow on the grass Or than her image in the stream."